50 Years and 600 Women Later, True Love

Love in the Time of Cholera

Waiting a lifetime for his dream lover: Javier Bardem, center, in Love in the Time of Cholera.Credit
Daniel Daza/New Line Cinema

“Love in the Time of Cholera” sets itself the elusive task of translating Gabriel García Márquez’s masterpiece of magical realism into an upscale art film with popular appeal. Faithful to the outline of the novel but emotionally and spiritually anemic, it slides into the void between art and entertainment, where well-intended would-be screen epics often land with a thud.

Stripped of multiple layers of philosophic and poetic implication, the metaphorically loaded story of a man’s lifelong passion for a beautiful woman who marries another man emerges as a weightless, picturesque gloss.

Florentino Ariza, a latter-day Colombian Don Quixote, is one of the greatest fools for love in modern literature. Javier Bardem, the movie’s primary asset, imbues this soulful, eccentric poet with the appropriate tragicomic balance of nobility and absurdity.

But one sure-footed performance can’t salvage the movie. The literary texture that elevates Florentino’s story to epic proportion on the page is missing here. Although the screenplay by Ronald Harwood (“The Pianist”) dutifully quotes and paraphrases Mr. García Márquez, Florentino comes across as a pallid Xerox copy of the author’s creation.

One fundamental problem is the disconnection between the novel’s Colombian-born author and the movie’s creators. Mike Newell (“Four Weddings and a Funeral”), who directed, is British, and Mr. Harwood, who was born in South Africa has a background in British theater, which may explain why the film’s characters, even those played by Hispanic actors, come across as relocated Dickensian caricatures.

The novel is a time capsule about the turn of the 19th into the 20th century, in which Florentino represents an impractical and superstitious 19th-century dreaminess. Juvenal Urbino (Benjamin Bratt), the handsome European-trained doctor who marries the object of Florentino’s lifelong obsession, Fermina Daza (Giovanna Mezzogiorno), is his 20th-century counterbalance. Juvenal represents the new era of science, technology and pragmatic problem solving. If romantic love is a disease like cholera, Juvenal has the knowledge and wherewithal to cure it. But the movie makes the doctor a shallow, self-important know-it-all strutting around in a cream-colored top hat and tails.

Ms. Mezzogiorno, the Italian actress who plays Fermina, is attractive and sultry. The character has the temperament of a heavy thunderstorm; the actress conveys only distant rumbles and flickers of lightning. As Florentino and Fermina age more than 50 years Mr. Bardem’s Florentino visibly shrinks and withers into a stooped old man whose cow-eyed gazes soften into a doting, faraway twinkle. Ms. Mezzogiorno’s much less convincing decline reminds you of the bluish-haired Elizabeth Taylor at the end of “Giant.” Although he has bedded more than 600 women, Florentino saves his essential self for Fermina. One of the novel’s most seductive notions is the idea of virginity of the soul, of the essential self reserved for one’s true love.

The film follows Florentino from his youth (Unax Ugalde plays him as a wide-eyed, trembling teenage suitor) who woos Fermina and initially wins her heart. But he loses her when her socially ambitious father, Lorenzo Daza (John Leguizamo, in a near-apoplectic one-note performance), bans him from the house and promotes her marriage to Juvenal. It ends in the 1930s, after Florentino has ascended from telegraph operator and writer-for-hire of flowery love letters, into a wealthy ship owner under the tutelage of his uncle, Don Leo (Hector Elizondo).

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The story’s circular structure begins in 1930s Cartagena with the death of Juvenal, which at long last gives Florentino license to resume his pursuit of Fermina after 50 years of pining, then doubles back to 1879. It ends with Florentino’s and Fermina’s voyage on a riverboat, which has dropped anchor in the Magdalena River.

The movie pushes this fable of endless love in the sentimental direction of “On Golden Pond.” In the novel’s vision of undying romantic obsession, Florentino is both the embodiment of passion ennobled by suffering and a ridiculous clown afflicted with the disease of passion, for which cholera is a pungent metaphor. In awkwardly illustrating this paradox the film teeters between slapstick (several scenes of Florentino’s frenetic sex life) and soap opera. The book’s philosophic content is reduced to a few scattered asides. The magical realism, in which the past pervades the present and the dead haunt the living, is suggested by the fleeting appearance of a ghost in the background.

The crucial missing ingredient, for which no amount of lush scenery can substitute, is the voice of Mr. García Márquez’s omniscient narrator. The language of “Love in the Time of Cholera” is its lifeblood. While reading the novel you can almost smell the stink of illness and death as well as the flowers and fecundity of life in a tropical climate. Where the novel wraps you in an intoxicating sensuality, the movie shrinks from the overwhelming physicality of Mr. García Márquez’s imagination. In its scenes of disease it politely wrinkles its nose before hurrying on.

That intimate proximity of life and death, the looming sense of fate that pervades Latin American fiction and in particular Mr. García Márquez’s writing, are absent. Perhaps a bolder director (Alfonso Cuarón? Guillermo del Toro? Alejandro González Iñárritu? Pedro Almodóvar?) more culturally attuned to this author and his voluptuous imagination might have found an appropriate cinematic language to tell the story. “Love in the Time of Cholera” has no voice of its own.

Directed by Mike Newell; written by Ronald Harwood, based on the novel by Gabriel García Márquez; director of photography, Alfonso Beato; edited by Mick Audsley; music by Antonio Pinto; production designer, Wolf Kroeger; produced by Scott Steindorff; released by New Line Cinema. Running time: 120 minutes.